Lacuna
by Mercaque
Summary: Six drabbles related to summer, all 200 words or less, one for each of the main characters.
1. Chapter 1

His target basked on a rock, its throat swelling and deflating rapidly, gleaming black eyes not yet having detected the nine-year-old boy on the hunt.

Frogs were really stupid, House had discovered.

If they detected a single motion, they focused on it to the exclusion of everything else. They were the most easily distracted creatures in the universe. And so House angled his right arm awkwardly, cursing its shortness, and wiggling his fingers to distract it.

Meanwhile his left hand flashed forward like lightning, grubby fingers wrapping ruthlessly around the amphibian's body. The creature immediately pissed itself, but House didn't care.

"Gotcha, moron," he told the squirming frog.

"Greg!" Mom called from across the yard. "Come on, honey, we're all packed up."

Dad's job would take them to Egypt soon. House looked down at the pathetically dumb frog, which had no clue how easily it could find itself in a jar being carted off to a place that was only sand and sky and the Sphinx.

"Greg! Come on!"

House opened his hands and watched the frog hop away into the wilderness. 


	2. Cuddy

The bikini was a screaming electric blue, barely held over her bountiful breasts by flimsy orange spaghetti straps. Her waist still arched smoothly, and the bottom House so liked to remark upon was as full and pert as ever, but she was perhaps most proud of her skin. It was soft and supple and tinted with olive, unblemished but for the smooth round shadow of her belly button.

Lisa Cuddy had a slamming body.

She put one hand on her hip and one leg forward. Her back arched and her chest thrown forward, Cuddy's posture could be interpreted as either jaunty or defiant. Her full black curls cascaded unapologetically past her bare shoulders, a million-dollar smile lighting her face.

It faded after a moment. But what a nice long moment it had been.

"I'm sorry, but not today." Cuddy straightened her crisp navy suit and handed the outrageously flimsy pile of nylon back to the fitting room attendant. "I have to get back to work." 


	3. Foreman

Eric had gotten out on a sweltering day in mid-June.

He'd been away long enough that he was afraid he might have forgotten this place, but no. The same sun beat down on the same concrete, the same bus brakes squealing past the same dilapidated liquor store through the same urban grime.

The place was the same, but the people had changed – or maybe it was just him. They all looked at him differently now. Dad kept a strange apprehensive distance, while Mom anxiously redoubled her affectionate gestures. His baby brother was the worst, staring at Eric through slitted eyes, accusatory and disgusted and maybe a little jealous too.

Of course, Eric held himself differently now too. He was harder, tougher. His tattoos had garnered attention, but also respect. Adversity had hardened him; he knew things they never would, but nobody wanted to acknowledge it. He ran with a different crowd now, and eventually he would turn into them, and all traces of chubby little Rerun would disappear forever. None of them realized the process had already begun.

Medical school, Eric thought. He may as well have come back from the moon. 


	4. Chase

The boy was miserable, his scrawny eight-year-old limbs viciously burned after a day on the beach. He was now swathed in cool sheets in his darkened bedroom, but nevertheless his skin was still red and raw and stinging.

His mother stood in the doorway, warm unfocused concern in her green eyes and a wine cooler in her hand. Father, meanwhile, perched on the side of the bed. He had brought with him a strange plant, one with a pungent grassy odor, that had been sliced open.

"I told you not to play too long in the sun, Robert." Father attempted a stern admonition, but tenderness overran his voice. "You know you've got pale skin."

He began began to rub the aloe into his son's sunburn, his hands big and gentle befitting his profession. The boy's brow unclenched as the cool creamy oil mercifully chased away his searing burns.

"Feel better?" Father asked.

A sleepy smile spread over his face. "Yeah."

Father chuckled and tousled the boy's blond hair affectionately. "You're as bad as your mother." 


	5. Cameron

They were comfortable enough together to sit on his patio in their bare feet, sharing margaritas while the sun went down. The cicadas' song vibrated through the air, the warm breeze rearranging Cameron's hair like a gentle hand.

Her companion's sad heavy eyes stared off at the horizon, his mouth drawn. Cameron knew all too well what he was thinking of, what made his shoulders slump and his chin rest so mournfully in his hand. He was a good man, and he didn't deserve what he had to endure.

The bite of tequila in their margaritas had grown progressively sharper. Cameron's blood grew warmer, and she found herself staring at the indents his lips had made on the salt rim of his glass. When he reached for it, Cameron recklessly threw out her hand to stop him.

"It'll be all right," she murmured, her voice soothing and sultry as the summer air.

He leaned in. Cameron knew misery had made him reckless. She didn't care.

But he broke their first kiss roughly, disgust in his black eyes.

"For Christ's sake, Allison, he's your husband."

And even after the funeral, things were never the same between them again. 


	6. Wilson

Wilson never knew exactly why the woman in the lobby of the Musee D'Orsay caught his attention.

She was no classic beauty, with her rough dark features and her hair concealed by a rust-colored headscarf. Perhaps it was her eyes – deep-set and velvety, like the nighttime sea.

Whatever it was, Wilson was watching when the guard openly sneered at her and her dirty Arabicized French, watching as she stood there and took it, stock-still except for her tightening lips and rippling eyes.

He'd followed her, and with his rough Quebec inflections had managed to console her over a cup of sludgy French coffee, and then they were off to the dingy motel room he was renting on his barely-out-of-med-school salary. There they'd made frantic love, on top of each other at all times due to the bed's smallness, her silken hair spilling out of the hejab and her grateful downy voice in his ear murmuring James—

He didn't, actually. It was one of James Wilson's lifelong regrets that his wife had chosen that moment to coo over a Rodin statue, and that when he'd turned back the woman was gone, having vanished namelessly into the Parisian crowds.

C'est la vie. 


End file.
